Why You Should Make 2024 The Year You Ditch The Scale For Good
When it comes to your health, your weight is the absolute worst thing you can focus on. Honestly.
The reality is that yes, body positivity is important for all of us. Another reality is that your weight can indicate underlying health issues going on – but this can be true if you are medically obese or severely underweight. When we look at how our body is functioning versus what we weigh, we get a better picture of overall health. How is your blood sugar? Your gut/liver health? Mental health? Hormone balance? To me, these are the four pillars of female health and matter to your wellbeing and longevity much more than your weight. It’s more important to have properly functioning body systems than to lose 10 pounds.
Your Goal Weight Assumes There Is An End To Your Health Journey
The dreaded goal weight. It’s just the worst.
We often have this vision in our heads of a magical dream weight we once were, the weight where we felt our best. Perhaps it was when you were twenty, your goal weight attached to this wonderful memory of frolicking on the beach in a bikini and feeling so light and free. Or maybe it’s when you were thirty, flirty and thriving, living your best life in your cute work fits and power suits. Here’s the thing - what you weighed then isn’t relevant to your weight now; you may have felt great at that weight at that age, but your body changes as you age and grow with the ebbs and flows of life, and with it so does your weight.
The more pressing issue of a goal weight is that it assumes an end to your health journey. Once you reach that weight, then what? You’ve reached your goal. So you can stop now I guess. Health journey over. And this happens surprisingly often – once many reach their goal weight, they think they’re all done taking care of themselves. Or you reach your goal weight, but it was so hard and unenjoyable to get there that this behaviour and this number is impossible to maintain, and you just can’t do it anymore. Bye bye goal weight.
Weight as a measure of health is outdated and needs to be scrpped.
If The Scale Doesn’t Go Down, You Feel Like A Failure
Just like any healing journey, the road to better health is not linear. This means that, depending on your specific health concerns and functional nutrition needs, your body may need to gain weight in order to function properly. Being healthier with properly functioning body systems is so much more important to your life than making that number on the scale go down.
Plus there are sooo many things that can make the scale go up, from water retention to stress to blood sugar to the weather to where you are in your cycle and more. But we live in a world where it’s encouraged for us to constantly make the scale go down, and this is when you get in to the situations where you will lose weight “by any means necessary”.
You Start To Want To Lose Weight By Any Means Necessary
Many potential clients come to me with the desire to lose weight, and some will do literally anything to do so, no matter how unhealthy. This begins the desperation into using weight loss drugs, drinks, etc. or worse leads to the development of an eating disorder. When you start to prioritize weight loss over health, you venture into dangerous territory. Society wants women to be as small s possible, and when. we try to get there by any means necessary, our health suffers. We are seeing women in their 50s and 60s with conditions like osteoporosis, autoimmune conditions, gut heath issues, mental health issues - all stemming from a lifetime of restriction, extreme dieting, and complete neglect of the body’s needs to stay thin no matter what. When you shift your mindset (easier said than done I know) to prioritize your health, your weight becomes less important than your overall wellbeing, and isn’t this what we all really want anyways? To be well? To feel good? Versus to achieve a weight that we don’t feel. good at?
You Can Be Considered Overweight But Be Perfectly Healthy
The typical way we rate our categories of weight is based on the Body Mass Index, or BMI scale. It was originally created by a Belgian astronomer and statistician named Adolphe Quatelat in his hopes to find a measurement for the “average man” (PMC2930234). It provides a height to weight ratio (weight in kg divided by height in metres squared), and this number indicates which category you fall under, from underweight, healthy/normal, overweight, obese, or extremely obese. The main issue with the BMI is that it does not differentiate between lean body mass (think bones, organs, skin etc) and body fat mass (the actual fat accumulated in the body). Someone with a high BMI may have low fat mass and high lean mass, and vice versa; it also doesn’t account for where the fat accumulation occurs – location matters in terms of risk of heart disease (PMC4890841).
In fact, the only time I think the BMI is accurate is when it indicates extreme obesity – I do not like this wording at all, but when you sit in this category, it means you have some body systems that aren’t functioning properly and need some time, attention and love. And you may have landed here because of medication, stress, eating habits, injury, etc etc etc etc. The good news is, that when we ditch the scale and focus on functional nutrition, we can help heal a lot of issues, and you can stop labelling yourself and putting yourself in finite categories.
Skinny Doesn’t Mean Healthy
You aren’t fat, you have fat. This statement is deeply true, because you can be thin and have fatty liver. You can be skinny and have a heart attack. You can be skinny and develop type 2 diabetes. And let’s be clear, there’s nothing wrong with being skinny either, if your body systems are functioning well. The point is that thin people can be unhealthy too – that’s why it’s always better to look at the way your body is functioning versus how thin (or not thin) you are.
Your Body, Not Your Weight
As long as you treat your body right using basic functional nutrition principles, your body will begin to tell you what’s up. For many people, working on improving nutrition can improve many health markers. For others, improving nutrition allows our body to identify struggles it may be having. For example, balancing blood sugar and improving gut health can vastly improve feelings of anxiety – if it doesn’t, then a closer look at one’s mental health may be needed.
I can say that at one point, when I was a vegetarian, I began to crave red meat like crazy, and I’d never ever been a big red meat eater, even when I ate meat. But I was craving steak and burgers so very badly. When I went for blood work, it showed that I was deficient in B12 – and guess where you get B12? Red meat.
Some facts about your body – it is ALWAYS trying to come into balance via a process called homeostasis. Your body WILL tell you what it needs in one way or another, if you can learn how to listen. And your body can improve and heal itself from many (definitely not all) health issues if you use functional nutrition combined with lifestyle changes to give your body what it needs.
Learn to listen to your body, because your weight can be like fake news – a poor indicator of what’s really going on.
There Are So Many More Important Measures of Health
Weight is just a symptom of other underlying issues going on inside your body – maybe. It’s the maybe that leads me to look at other factors of health that can indicate a need for love and attention.
When we look at the definition of metabolic syndrome, it is a condition that includes a cluster of health and all-cause mortality risk factors, and weight is not one of them. Risk factors include waist circumference, triglyceride levels, blood pressure, HDL cholesterol levels, and fasting glucose levels.
Other health indicators I like to look at are HbA1c (a measure of average blood sugar over 3 months), gut bacterium levels, bowel movement frequency and stool consistency, cortisol levels, hormone levels – there are actually so many factors that can be examined, that weight is just not a necessary one. Tbh, using weight as a measure of health seems to do more harm than good.
When You Take Care of Your Body, Your Weight Will Take Care Of Itself (And You Might Not Be As Thin As You Thought)
Body function over everything. This means that not only might you not meet your goal weight, but the weight your body functions best at might not be as thin as you want, or expect. Trust me that it’s better to have your body functioning well that to be rail thin. And you may naturally be thin and small and your body functions great…that’s great too. Like I said, body function over everything – when we take on this mindset, weight doesn’t matter. When your body functions well, your weight will take care of itself. And in the meantime, you and your body deserve love from you, no matter what your size.
Feeding your body the food that it needs to feel good and function well is a radical act of self-love, and one that we as women all need to spend more time working on. Let’s all work together to feel good both in and about our bodies and ditch the scale for good.